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1. Introduction
International construction joint ventures (ICJVs) are recognized as temporary arrangements for carrying out projects with at least one partner headquartered outside the country of operation (Hwang et al., 2017). Setting up ICJVs is a strategic choice of global competition, and it could bring about several benefits for construction firms, including strategic market entry, business diversification, sharing of resources and risk sharing (Hwang et al., 2016). Accordingly, ICJVs have been commonly used around the world, especially in megaprojects (Ozorhon et al., 2010). Meanwhile, ICJVs are difficult to manage for the reason that different parities of ICJVs may have different values, managerial systems as well as philosophies. As a result, ICJVs are usually perplexed by high instability, as well as poor performance (Ozorhon et al., 2008a). It has been thus widely accepted that cooperation between partners within ICJVs is one of vital determinants of project success and associated positively with ICJV performance (Gong et al., 2007).
However, achieving successful cooperation between ICJVs partners is challenging due to their different cultural background. Culture can be defined as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede, 2003). Cultural differences not only result in conflicts among different parties but also make it difficult to manage projects, rendering international partners’ inharmonious cooperation and unsatisfactory project performance (Liu et al., 2015). According to Salvato et al. (2017), determining mechanisms of cooperation can be divided into three paths, namely, macro-to-micro (how cultural issues affect the cooperative behavior), micro-to-micro (how individual motivation to cooperate) and micro-to-macro (how self-interested individuals who identify with their firm can be aggregated into collaborative inter-firm bureaucracies). In our study, the macro-to-micro path (how cultural issues affect the cooperative behavior) is the focus of research. Although factors such as trust (Fu et al., 2015), fairness (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999), as well as reciprocity (Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger, 2004) also affect cooperation, they fall into micro-to-micro and micro-to-macro paths, thus not considered in this study.
Cultural differences are mainly manifested in both national and organizational levels, which may have influence on international joint venture performance (Pothukuchi et al., 2002). Seeing that organizational culture can be varied, organizational culture differences are...